Welcome to Tiger Tales, an exciting collection of seven almost true animal stories from old Singapore, brought to you by the same people behind The Little Singapore Book. This 96-page hardcover compendium is aimed at 4- to 8-year-olds, and comprises stories based on actual, documented events that happened more than a century ago. Retold in gentle, storytelling narrative, they are accompanied by lusciously rendered illustrations to captivate little readers and fire their imagination.
With much of old Singapore still covered in jungle, encounters with animals were not uncommon for those who lived here. Tiger Tales brings to life some of these little-known episodes, from a crazy rain of fish and the discovery of a giant croc in the Rochor River, to a conundrum with tapirs and the delights of a zoo in our very own Botanic Gardens. Of course, no compendium of Singapore’s animal stories can go without the legend of Sang Nila Utama—did he really see a lion, we wonder? —and the dramatic story of the tiger under the billiard room. Along the way, readers also meet a cast of colourful yet real people from the past—including Colonel William Farquhar, the First Resident of Singapore, the famous Ming Dynasty admiral Zheng He, and Charles Phillips, the former principal of the Raffles Institution who marches into these pages in his pyjamas.
The ultimate goal is to give our readers rollicking good stories that are perfect for bedtime reading or sharing aloud. Through these tales, they also discover a menagerie of animals—many native to our land—and learn to appreciate Singapore’s amazing biodiversity past and present.
What’s more, children are treated to a unique taste of life in old Singapore like never before, and hopefully have their curiosity piqued about our history. And just like The Little Singapore Book, all the illustrations here have been painstakingly researched and brought to life in captivating detail. All the animals and insects that appear in Tiger Tales can be accurately identified, thus offering another point of conversation and discovery for children.